


the soft animal of your body

by toujours_nigel



Series: Electorate [2]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Canon Trans Character, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 11:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5047126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shekhar Panchal comes home a (new) man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the soft animal of your body

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts), [Aureliano_B](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aureliano_B/gifts).



> All locations real. All Hindi translateable via Google. No idea about monsoon schedule in 1996. 
> 
> Cheers.

Shekhar comes back in April one morning while the twins are at school.

The party workers stare at him or ignore him if they are old and new respectively. Mai is at the school waiting to collect the kids, and Babuji in a closed-door conference and to be disturbed in no case less dire than the house burning down.

He climbs the steps to his bedroom, dumps his bags, slams the door locked and strips. He has been on T and under the knife and on elaborate cocktails that make him look less a ragdoll put together out of convenient scraps. It is strange, still, to stand in the room where he used to be dressed for dance recitals and where he learnt to use kohl and drape a sari and look at himself and not yearn to cover his breasts, the darkness between his legs, with inadequate hands. _I am changed_ , he thinks, and laughs at his laughing reflection. _I am me_.

 

The children are clearly tutored and terribly stiff, squirming in their seats and unable to meet his gaze and unable to look away. Five is not too young to form lasting memory, nor seven too late not to have forgotten. Besides, they will have been told, _your didi is now a man_ , as though to make him a circus freak on par with a Bearded Lady is to ease things. Though they don’t have those things here, so perhaps rather as some species of anti-hijra.

It will take weeks to habituate them, but even Mai is staring at him covertly, fascinatedly, and plying him with parathas and rajma as though he hasn’t eaten in days. He is eating as though he hasn’t eaten in days, and in fact he hasn’t for a full twenty-four hours between nerves and air-sickness. This body takes in and needs more food than previously and he forgets to appease it often and then pays for it.

He praises the food and Mai gleams and Babuji scoffs and then again there is silence. He lowers his head and he eats.

At night his body is stiff beneath the sheets, afraid. In this room he has never lain like this, with his penis quiescent and heavy against his thigh under the pajamas, under the sheets.

 

In the morning Babuji comes into his room with the morning chai-nashta, and tells him what work there is at hand and he acquiesces to the unstated expectation and goes the rounds that day, and then again, and then again. He stands at Babuji’s shoulder and shakes hands and notes expressions and tells Babuji.

Babuji smiles and nods and tells him secrets and claps on the shoulder and introduces him as “My son Shekhar, bilkul mere jaisa dikhta hain”.

Men who have known him since he was three and wearing kohl for his first faltering attempts at Bharatnatyam nod and grin and say “Shekhar beta it’s so good to have you back, what would you have done with a Masters anyway, baapka haath batao, bete hote kis liye hain?”

If it was so easy.

If it was always so easy.

When he was eighteen and they had been trying to marry him off to fix him.

When he was fifteen and trying to drink himself into oblivion.

Into death.

When he was twelve and getting his period.

When he was seventeen and trying to fuck himself into normalcy on the fingers and mouths of willing boys.

When he was twenty and letting Shyam fight for him because all the fight had gone from him.

When he was.

When was it so easy?

If it was always so easy why

 

Yajna comes to him in the garden. It is mid-day and everyone is dozing, in bed and on hard chairs and spread at length on the uncomfortable wood of the long benches in the outer hall. She and Dhri were dragged away by the ayah not an hour ago.

She comes to him quietly, like she’s hoping to sneak up, and he plays along for a while, grabbing her at the last and swinging her upside down. She giggles and bats at him and climbs him when let down.

She is a little small for seven, all limbs on his lap. She doesn’t look much like him. Something about the stubborn chin, perhaps, and the tip-tilted eyes. Not like Dhri, who looks like Babuji time-travelled in early childhood. Yajna looks like nobody so much as the photos of Amba thakurain, Babuji’s bua who killed herself. Not the best association for a little girl, but he heard it himself plenty, growing up. Yajna even has her colour, the same bright darkness, gleaming.

They inspect each other solemnly, and she says, “Gimme Cadbury.” Not a trace of request in the voice. No coyness for his little girl.

No chocolates either, but that gives her pause for all of a minute.

“I’m going to call you Bhaisa’ab,” she tells him gravely. “I don’t like calling Dhri Bhaiyya, and you’re too old to call by your name.”

Seven. It’s not so young, and she is still and quiet now, her body balanced on his lap and her head on his shoulder and tilted back to look him in the eye.

“I like Bhaisa’ab,” he tells her, folds both arms around her torso. “I think it suits very well.”

She nods and is quiet a moment, tugging at the end of her braid. Then she looks up again, rapid enough she cracks her temple against his chin.

“Tell me about America!”

 

In the last week of May, Mai flags him down at the head of the stairs and hands him the hallway phone, cord stretched to its limits. The receiver is new and sleek and slippery from Mai’s oily hands. Shekhar wedges it between his shoulder and ear and digs for a handkerchief in the capacious pockets of his kurta.

He says, “Hullo,” and someone inhales. He says it again, tensing. Downstairs there’s Rahim chacha and outside in the car Raju and Chandar and one of them can get a call-tracking device and any of them can make life hell for whoever is heavy-breathing at him. He’s an idiot for tensing.

“Ghar aaya mera pardesi,” Shyam sings in a fair approximation of tune. “Chutiye, you couldn’t tell me? I have to hear of it from party gossip? This is what I get, this is what you give me, raand ki aankh, gandu, bakchod saale.”

Well. Shyam definitely thinks of him as a man.

“You know how it is,” he says, lets a Yankee twang into his voice. “Busy, busy, busy.”

“”Busy! And we’re, what, sitting pretty? You’re coming to Kesariya. Next week, I don’t even care, you just are.”

“I really am busy,” he tries. He is. Babuji needs him around. Elections are around the corner, practically.

“Week after next,” Shyam says. “Don’t give me excuses about work.”

 

It takes a week more than that.

Rahim chacha drives him down with a sheaf of papers that need attention from whichever male relative of acceptable age Shyam has working as front-man. It drizzles the whole time, and about noon the wind picks up and rain lashes the window, momentarily reducing visibility. If they were going off the road they would be in trouble. But East Champaran is well-maintained as regards the highway. Besides, Kesariya gets tourists.

Shekhar has been here just the once, while he was in school and pigtails. Shyam was growing up somewhere else, then. They hadn’t met.

The road, for the most part, is familiar. He has been to the Valmiki Reserve, in college and toting a camera instead of the rifle his hands were itching for. The town is unfamiliar, and the house they pull up in front of is unfamiliar, and the man he who comes out to greet them and take the documents from Rahim chacha and insist on “sharbat before you leave, at least sharbat, chachajaan you’re being cruel to us and mocking our hospitality and good name, come now, you’re sure, okay, yes, I’ll see to that, he’ll call, he’ll call, actually if you’re going you might as well take it to our office in Manth, nobody here but me, Bhaiyya’s gone to West Champaran to talk to Prasen. Khuda hafiz.”

That man is unfamiliar, put together from bits and pieces of others of the Yadav men and women Shekhar has known since childhood, with Prithaji’s upright carriage and Devakiji’s eyes and Vasu’s reach and something of their father’s jaw visible underneath the full beard. In his head, Shyam is eighteen and drunk in the night, nineteen and sombre over the phone, twenty and an impassioned shield between him and the world.

They’re twenty-two, now. Shyam’s nearly twenty-three. It would be the worst sort of hypocrisy for Shekhar to say anybody’s changed beyond recognition. He shoulders his duffle and walks a careful eighteen inches behind Shyam, to the door and through it.

There is evidence of careless inhabitation, one of the bedrooms thrown open and ransacked in the wake of Vasu’s abrupt departure, another made up for him with fresh sheets and a faintly musty smell lingering in the edges despite the thrown-open windows. Water has dripped in and stained the old plaster.

He throws his bag into the closet, strips and stands under the too-cold needles of the shower, drags on a t-shirt and pyjamas and ventures downstairs. Outside the afternoon sun is soaking the damp away in red swoops.

 

Shyam looks up when he finds the study after opening five doors—bedroom, bathroom, bathroom, kitchen—and says, “Five minutes, then I’m all yours all weekend.”

Fifteen minutes on, when Shekhar is hip-deep in _The Hindu_ , he finally stuffs all his scraps of paper into a covered file and the file into the bottom drawer of his desk and stands. “Why can’t these ossified old men retire?”

“Nobody would vote for us,” Shekhar offers. “You’re not dependable till you’re forty.”

“Too long to wait. At least I can run Bhaiyya this year.”

“Nobody’s going to vote for him.”

Shyam says, “O ye of little faith,” and comes around the desk and up to Shekhar quicker than looks entirely likely, and then they are in each other’s arms.

They don’t fit.

It’s four years and change since they watched Mughal-e-Azam and mumbled along with the dialogues and Shekhar groped his way to his name.

They don’t fit anymore, he’s grown too tall, put on too much muscle to be tucked in under Shyam’s arm, has lost too many curves to have Shyam’s arm wrapped about his waist, Shyam’s hand on his hip.

Shyam steps back decorously and says, “I’ll take you around tomorrow. I had Mala chachi cook us Dakbunglow Chicken. You’ll like it.”

“You sound very sure. I’ve had it before and it’s not too much to my taste.”

Shyam laughs at him. “Sound elegant at someone who hasn’t seen you eat biriyani straight from the fridge at three in the morning.”

“I was hungry.”

“The gas was less than a foot away from you, and the microwave was right beside you. Excuses mat bana. We’re watching TV, you have preferences?”

Shyam loves terrible American soaps. If this is secretly a gesture towards familiarity made on hekhar’s behalf, he’s not too proud to accept it. He might still be sitting in his shitty apartment in Brooklyn, with American accents in his ear and popcorn at his elbow.

The furniture is entire dimensions more comfortable. By nine Shekhar has curled up on the sofa and dropped off into oblivion, pillowed on Shyam’s thigh. It takes a full five minutes to wake him for dinner.

The food is. Hell, he’s young and hungry and it’s food. The spices are too intense and he has to fight not to reach for the water jug again and then again, but Shyam looks about one gulp away from laughing, so Shekhar makes do with plain rice.

After, they watch _Amar, Akbar, Anthony_ and begin mocking with the blood transfusion and never quite finish. Sometime into the third song Shyam reaches one long arm out to drag him back down into his prone position. By the time the credits roll he has a crick in his neck and Shyam’s hand is a brand through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, unerringly at the spot between his shoulder-blades that aches from not having to bear the weight of breasts. He wants very little as much as never having to move again.

Hi room is cool and the mattress a balm to his back, but those he gets at home. He stays up an hour, stubbornly reading a dog-eared copy of _Kane and Abel_ , and never hears Shyam come up.

 

They go sight-seeing on what turns out to be the first day of the monsoons. The skies open up around five with little warning and they are drenched in the two minutes it takes to get from the stupas to the car, running flat out. There are towels on the seats, but he’s sure they still seep through.

Shyam has had a stranger childhood than most, but growing up in three, four, six homes and knowing them intimately is a part of it that Shekhar knows himself to the bone. He could be set down blindfold in any part of Farukhabad or Bareilly and find his way to the safety of the party offices. The twins know it a little less, and even Shekhar—well, he went away to school for eight years, Shyam went into hiding. For things that sound so different, they’re not that unlike.

Shyam gets them home through bylanes and open fields and state property and very possibly people’s courtyards. The roads aren’t as well-laid as they ought be, so far from the national and state highways, and the rain is going very nearly sideways, and the car doesn’t skid once, Shyam’s light hand on the wheel guiding it sure as a race-horse. If this politics thing went all to pot Shyam could become a chauffeur, or an F1 racer.

The lights have gone out. Mala chachi and her unnamed husband are struggling with the generator and hurricane lanterns. There is a lit torch on a little table just beside the door, casting heavy shadows on the curves and ridges of the marble bust weighing it down. Every house Shekhar’s lived in has had those statues. They sit there and collect dust and bits of skin and blood when kids knock into them.

They pick up the torch and go feeling their way up the stairs, groping for the banister and careful where they put their feet. Shekhar has cat eyes. Shyam, who goes scrambling about in forests with Maoists for the fun of it, Shyam probably has leopard’s eyes. The house is dark, but the skies outside are only shifting grey, roiling with clouds, not impentrable. They go up slowly, slipping a little in the water, on the shine of the tiled floor in the light of the torch.

There are candles in Vasu’s room, which is next Shekhar’s, and in Shyam’s, which is on its other side, edging on a balcony. None in Shekhar’s that they can see, and the navigable mess in Vasu’s has been implacably cleaned, put away beyond recognition.

 

They go to Shyam’s room with Shekhar’s duffle dragging on the floor behind him, tugged along by one long strap. It has little wheels that catch on carpets and door-mats.

Shyam’s room is a revolting shade of curdled milk that might once have been white or ivory. It has a writing desk and an almirah and a mirror and a little en suite bathroom and a couple shelves that Shekhar’s sure are for knick-knacks but Shyam’s got stuffed full of papers. There’s wall-to-wall carpet, old enough Shekhar doesn’t feel guilty about dripping on it.

They’re going to catch their death of cold if they keep dripping.

Shyam goes around with his Zippo, lighting the candles in their mirrored holders. The room’s a pale yellow in the light, brilliant. He can see Shyam limned, every cut and cord of muscle.

Shyam can see

“Get towels,” he says. “Paracetamol, if you have any. At least Disprin, I’ll start a headache in two.”

Shyam ducks into the bathroom, ducks out looking annoyed, hunts in his almirah and throws a towel at Shekhar, tugs his t-shirt over his head and throws it into the bathroom, starts work on his belt, pulling the wet leather laboriously out of the buckle.

This is what the therapists meant, Shekhar thinks, clutching the towel till his knuckles creak against skin. These things that men do, around each other and out in the open and with a complete lack of shame, that he has never done. Twenty years in a female body, and when their parents had spoken of marriage Shyam had looked at him consideringly, weighing options.

Now he’s a man outside his own head and it’s nothing to strip in front of Shyam, who won’t even turn his back for it. It’s good of Shyam.

Scars are manly.

It’s dark enough, and the shadows leap.

He sets his teeth and unbuttons his shirt, drags it out of his belt, unbuckles the belt and toes out of his shoes before the sodden denim can hit the floor, tugs his undershirt up and over his head, wraps the towel around his waist and pulls his underpants off underneath, letting everything settle into a sodden pile.

He’ll take it to the bathroom later. Hell, he’ll wash them himself, own two hands, he did enough of it in boarding school, laundering bloody panties in secret, wringing his hands in the sink like some menial Lady Macbeth.

There’s clean everything in his duffle, and he gets the boxers on under the towel with a minimum of contortion. With the t-shirt in his hands he risks a look up at Shyam again. It’s unnerving, to be looked at without an ounce of clinical distance.

This body. He broke and built himself from the inside out, and Amba thakurain’s legacy paid for it, and Babuji let it happen with benign negligence and actual permission, and Uma found him and kept him sane among pitying strangers, but Shyam fought for his right to have it, set shoulders to his and pushed at the world, made mockery of conventions he holds close, promised to sign his own life over on the strength of two years’ friendship.

He unwraps the towel and mops himself, rubs his hair dry, rough with it. His whole life he’d had long hair, the sort you could braid and forget, straight and unstyled. His first month in America he’d chopped it off, first thing he’d changed. It’s longer now, but not by much, the shape of his skull visible underneath.

Shyam’s hair is longer, curls brushing his shoulder, mixing in with his full beard and curled moustache. There’s water in all of it, and he wants to cross the room and pat it dry, punch Shyam in the face, pull at his beard, anything to break the gaze.

It’s new. Shyam at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, his Shyam, the one he remembers, was clean shaven, with a mouth most girls would have killed to have, to have on them. Eyelashes for miles, and a smile that went crook. A beautiful boy.

“Does it help you fit in better with the terrorists?” he asks, crouches down to hunt for pajamas, shorts, something. It isn’t always fun, being in a fully-functional male body. Shyam has been good to him.

“Maoists,” Shyam corrects automatically. He gets pedantic sometimes. Terrorists, Maoists, it’s all one to the government. “You should try it, it’ll make you look older.”

“It’ll make me look like a man?” He ducks his head, looking for clothes. Mai went through his bag before he left, it’s all jeans and t-shirts and button-downs and not a single blasted pair of

“Like Veerappan,” Shyam says, and reaches down to grip him by the shoulder, tilt him back against the wall till his face is visible. “Big dacoitish pair of whiskers disappearing into your sideburns.” He traces the proposed path with one skimming finger, then balls his hand into a fist and clouts Shekhar. “Idiot. It’ll make you look older. No bad thing in our line of work.”

“I’ll give it a try,” he says, then adds, insistent, “I can grow one. I shave.”

“Isn’t it a pain? Half the reason I grew this jungle. I kept forgetting and bhabi told me it was better for her nerves if I stopped looking like a cross between a beggar and a murderer.”

“Shyam,” he tries, “I’m...”

“Idiot,” Shyam says again, lays hands on him, drags him up. “Let me see.”

“Seeing doesn’t typically involve touching” he says, standing unresistant.

“I’ve gone blind from your beauty and need to use Braille,” Shyam retorts, and sweeps his hands over his body, back, sides, torso, great calming sweeps like the scars are nothing, like Shekhar’s changed body is nothing, like he’s a horse that’s had a hard run and can’t be put away wet.

“Maybe you really are going blind,” Shekhar says, drags Shyam’s hands off, holds him by the wrists. His fingers don’t lap around the bones.

“Scars are very manly,” Shyam promises him, and frees a hand to touch one that marks the boundaries of his disappeared left breast.

It’s four months since Shekhar went under the knife. He’s still tender. He might always be. He’s been touched by more people than he ever thought of; more invasively than he’d ever wanted. From Shyam it’s the most delicate intimacy.

When he had a woman’s body, Shyam had wanted him, however perfunctorily. He had been inside then as he was now visibly, and he had

“What would I ever do without your approval,” he drawls, and lets go of Shyam, and steps away to punch into his clothes and check on the generator.

 

They come up from dinner to find two pillows laid on Shyam’s bed, and two quilts. The generator powers up three rooms in the house including the study where they ate extremely cautiously, and the other is Vasu’s. They’re friends, and Mala chachi has let it be known that she sees no point, when they’re going to be up talking half the night anyway, and after all Vasu Sa’ab is a lot more particular about his things.

Shyam is quiet over it, shocky after all his banter during dinner. He lines bolsters down the middle of the bed, paces and smokes a cigarette and then another without offering to counter and finally sweeps a grandiose bow and says, “Your honour is safe with me.”

Shekhar laughs. “I haven’t been a woman for months.”

Shyam stills completely, even the air in the room going heavy around him. “You didn’t know. Well, good-night. Don’t kick.”

He kicks, wakes in the night to find his quilt in a heap against the footboard, bolsters everywhere and Shyam gone. The night is cool, and the air smells damply, wonderfully of wet earth. Petrichor. They bottle and sell it in Hyderabad, in the attar shops of Laad Bazar, but that’s synthetic, smells nothing like this, so wild.

Shyam returns midway through his second pilfered cigarette, steals it back and stands for a minute savouring the curl of smoke in his mouth. He smokes Charminars, the unfiltered stuff that’s barely above a biri, and is in severe danger of being scorched with the paper.

“A girl I know,” Shyam says, flicking away the last milimeter of ashes, “smells like this. It’s like being on rain-drenched earth, to be in a room with her. The lights have come back on, and these people are asleep. You should try and develop a snore, nice masculine thing to have.”

“I don’t have the nose for it,” Shekhar says, unaccountably shy, and busies himself in fussing with the cigarettes. “Where’d you get the Zippo?”

“Bhaiyya. Don’t ask where he got hold of it, he won’t remember. We should sleep if you’re done. Shut the windows, no sense getting soaked.”

Climbing back under the quilt, he asks, “What’s her name? Your rain-scented girl, what is she called?”

“Satyaa,” Shyam says. “Satyabhama, her grandmother named her, or maybe her grandmother’s mother. They call her Bhama at home.”

Shyam says, “She’s Prasen’s niece; Shatrajit’s daughter.” He laughs a little, slips out of bed to switch off the lights.

It isn’t dark.

Shekhar says, “It’ll pass. Everything does,” and watches Shyam go still again, like a statue of himself, not even breath stirring him. After a minute he slides to lie flat, his back to the door, and closes his eyes.

After another minute, a slow-counted sixty in breath, Shyam sits down heavily and reaches across him for a sheaf of papers. Night-owl, Shekhar thinks drowsily. Workaholic. Mad man.

He dozes and wakes and the clock shows three and Shyam is still awake, still hunched over his papers, blinking, bleary. He drags the back of a hand over his eyes, glances over at Shekhar and looks caught out.

“I’m not going to learn how to snore,” Shekhar says, angry suddenly and gentle with it. “I’m probably not going to grow a moustache. I’m not going to do anything to make myself more masculine. I’m not planning on becoming a Sunil Shetty clone. I like my body. I spent a lot of money on it. It’s a man’s body and if you don’t approve, it doesn’t matter. The good thing about being a man is I don’t have to care about opinions on my appearance.”

“I don’t disapprove,” Shyam says into the gloom, darkly amused.

“If you’re uncomfortable with me in the bed I’ll take the floor.”

“When I told our parents I’d marry you and you could go through with it afterwards, I wasn’t proposing to sue for divorce,” Shyam says, and laughs. “That _was_ rather the threat.”

The darkness is a many coloured thing. Behind his closed eyes are bursting stars. There’s a ringing in his ears. He cannot say to Shyam, as to anyone else, that he does not mean it. Shyam is not in the business of being taken less than seriously.

He says instead, “You like women.”

Shyam says, “Too. Should I offer to sleep on the floor?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not going to kick you out of your own bed. Sleep.”

Shyam looks, absurdly, hesitant for a moment. He files his papers under the bed, reaches to tug at the cord of the bedside lamp, and settles down curled away from Shekhar. His breathing slows.

Shekhar ghosts a hand over his arm, his twisted-in flank and lies back-to-back with him, facing the window.

It is still raining.

 

It is still raining when he wakes, and Shyam is poised above him, reaching to tug a book out of its place on the shelf. He startles and looks chagrined and drops the book on Shekhar’s stomach, prompting a pillow fight they both roll into with rather more enthusiasm than seemly for men their age. The pillows go fast enough, and then they are jostling, each blocking blows and holding flailing limbs captive till they are chest to heaving chest, Shyam on all fours above Shekhar, caging him in.

Shekhar looks away.

“Your eyes are the same,” Shyam says. “I thought they’d be deeper-set. Nothing else. You didn’t call, you didn’t write.”

“I thought you’d never answer. Severing ties would be sensible. I’m not going to hide, I can’t hide. If we’re friends, still, if we’re close.”

“After my parents got out,” Shyam says, heaves himself off and to one side, curls back towards him and holds on, hand fisted in the hem of his t-shirt, “they sent me to a proper school. I lasted for a year, sat my boards and came back. There was a boy. Scholarship kid, Brahmin, bullied no end. You know what boarding schools like that are. I stopped all that, kept him with me, made sure he was left alone. He would have done anything.”

“You never asked,” Shekhar tells him, taking his clenched fingers in one hand and sheltering them.

“He would have done anything,” Shyam says, and uncurls his hand to hold Shekhar’s. His voice is even, nonchalant, and the grip of his hand casual. Only his eyes are burning.

“I won’t,” Shekhar promises, and kisses him on the forehead, the cheek, retreats to kiss his knuckles, open and turn the hand over to kiss the palm.

Shyam is very dark against the sheets, against Shekhar’s own effete pallor. The palms of his hands are lotus pink, and his fingers are long and beautiful. Shekhar nips at one, takes the tip of the ring finger between his teeth and licks at the pad, the whorls of fate.

“We’re friends,” Shyam says, “and nobody here will talk.” He traces the lines of Shekhar’s mouth with his thumb, tilts his chin up with his knuckles.

“I rest content,” Shekhar says, and leans in to kiss him on the mouth.

 

The rain stops before they do. Kissing Shyam is addictive, his mouth soft and sure and inexplicably sweet. They lie in bed touching at the hand and shoulder and neck and mouth, a bolster tucked between their bodies. If Shyam is being kind, he’s not too proud to accept it.

In this body he has kissed Uma drunkenly to prove he could. She’d sighed and tucked him in bed and stayed perched on the edge on top of the sheets with his head on her lap, putting him to sleep. He had been released from hospital the day before and he’d floated down from waking dream to sleep. In the morning he had reached for her and they’d made love as though still dreaming, her skin cool under his searching mouth, their bodies fitting strangely together, both of them careful of his tendernesses.

When they had done she’d laughed and said, “I’m marking the days till I can have something other than your tongue,” and he’d saluted.

In a week she’d been gone. In clubs and coffee shops since he’d averted his eyes and ignored hints dropped, and in sessions disappointed his therapist.

He doesn’t like strange eyes on him. Strange hands. He had gone dancing and had to leave, had sat flat on the sidewalk and wrapped his arms around his knees and shaken. He had taken the first flight out he could manage after he was declared fit to travel, after his papers came through.

At home he’s a good son, a good assistant, a good brother. He puts on a fresh kurta every morning and buttons himself beneath it. Below the waist, below the neck, he has been asleep two long months.

With Shyam he is coming alive, alit, sparking, every touch a shock. It has been so long since he was touched by anyone he wasn’t paying for the privilege. He was seventeen and getting off with boys from his sibling-school, the class bicycle who never said no but wouldn’t give away her virginity. He was twenty-one and making love to a woman he could hardly believe existed. He was twenty-two and pain-wracked and losing her.

His body has been a minefield a cage a trap and now. He drags Shyam on top of him, strokes hands down his back and rolls their hips together, kisses his throat, his shoulder, the curve of his ear and the hollow between his collar-bones, realises he is laughing only inside his own head. His t-shirt is damp from his tears, his vision blurring.

Shyam wraps arms and legs around him, grounds him in his own skin, in the bed, in the present. His hands are long of finger and broad of palm and soothing as they press the goosebumps from his arms, chafe his hands, cup his jaw. His mouth darts over Shekhar’s skin, ghosting kisses.

“You are safe here,” Shyam is saying when words become comprehensible again. “I have you. I know everyone’s secrets, nobody will harm you or hurt you. Your father would see them dead first.”

“Some man I make,” Shekhar says, hiccups. “Hiding behind. Get me the damn water.”

“Most men don’t flay themselves open to be built up better,” Shyam says while he’s drinking and unable to retort.

He chokes it down, drops the bottle off the bed, grips the sheets to stop himself lunging at Shyam. “Most men don’t need to. Most men don’t have to grow moustaches or develop a convincing snore, or learn how to walk at twenty-bloody-two, or to flip all their agreement markers because every word they speak is intended for a woman’s mouth.”

“You should confine yourself to English,” Shyam says.

He isn’t in particularly good shape. Even with the extra muscle the fatigue of the operations and the enforced civility of his stateside life have him in worse condition than he’s been since he was sixteen. It wouldn’t have helped. Those stories of Shyam creeping about in forests, they’re no joke. Between one breath and the next he’s flat on his belly with Shyam sitting on his hips, one arm bent back.

It’s a caress, compared to what Shyam could do, the restraint of it insultingly obvious. He can’t move, but within the compass of his grip there is no pain. He just has to lie there. If he moves there will be pain, if he stays still and quiet, none.

Shyam says, “I shan’t say you’re the bravest man I know, but you’re among them.”

“Your terrorists would be very insulted if they heard.”

Shyam breathes laughter. “Not the ones I’m thinking of,” he says, and moves a little, puts his hand on the hem of Shekhar’s t-shirt, slips it underneath to touch skin. “Let me?”

A man born might have fought. A man born might not have wanted to fight. Twenty years everyone thought he was a woman. He’s been taught. They’re in bed, they’ve kissed, they’ve. Something is owed.

Above all there is the promise of pain.

He says, “Don’t leave bruises,” and flattens out, goes slack and sinks into the mattress. The way he’s pressed down he can see a sliver of the pillows, the dingy white wall, the window. He closes his eyes.

Shyam says, “You idiot,” and rucks his t-shirt up, lets his arm loose. “This is a game. Let’s convince people Dhrupad Panchal has two sons. Every bit of it helps. So you go under the knife. So you grow a moustache. So you force your voice deeper. So you sit with your legs spread instead of crossed. Doing more doesn’t mean you’re less. Did it hurt?”

“I was drugged. I was unconscious. Afterwards. I couldn’t walk by myself for days. This girl I know, Uma, she helped me. She was the only friend I had.”

“It looks livid,” Shyam says, leans down to press his mouth to the edge of it, leans up to kiss his hair. “Can you get hard?”

“Some times. Most of the time. Not without reason.”

“How big is it?” Shyam pokes him in the midriff, laughs like he’s the one being tickled. “Did you get one of the monsters you see in porn? What a chance.”

These things that men do. These things that men don’t fear. A man sitting astride him, a man he cannot fight off, a man caressing him and asking about his body, his sex life.

The fear goes out of him. It’s all a game.

“They stitched on a horse’s,” he says, rolls to unseat Shyam and again to press him down, rests his elbows on his chest and his chin on clasped hands. “I have to get my trousers specially made with an inbuilt sheath.”

“You’re training to be a politician,” Shyam says, tipping his chin down to look at Shekhar and wrinkling his nose, “how are you such a bad liar?”

“We believe in telling the public the truth,” he says, and is up and off the bed before Shyam can stop laughing.

 

They’re lingering over breakfast when Vasu arrives and proceeds to commandeer a chair, the coffee-pot and a half-dozen parathas, all without noticing Shekhar or doing more than nodding distractedly at Shyam.

He has been travelling since dawn without pause.

“Something,” he says over the fourth parathas, “is up with Prasen. He’s been going up into the woods and making friends with the people there. I told you to come with me chhotu, this is why. Who the hell is this?”

“I’ll come with you tomorrow,” Shyam promises. “Or I’ll go tomorrow and you can head to Manth like you wanted. This is Shekhar, Dhrupadji’s older son. You’ve met.”

Vasu shakes hands with an increasingly suspicious look. “Have we?”

“I wasn’t quite myself then,” Shekhar says, and returns serenely to his kamalkakri while they fight it out over idiot-wrangling versus paperwork.

 

Shyam drives him out to Manth in the late hours. Rahim chacha is still dawdling there and Shyam prefers to creep up on the enemy’s flank. Vasu’s frontal assault has proven futile. Vasu is keeping house.

Shekhar has met nobody who likes Prasen in his years of tagging along after Babuji and his weeks of being acknowledged. The man is a limpet on the ship of state. A barnacle.

“We’re for the people,” Shyam says, pulling onto the highway. “Of course we do well for ourselves, but it shouldn’t be at their cost. Drain them, deprive them, but don’t drain them dry. Nobody’s stupid enough to not know when they’re being betrayed. These idiots don’t understand that, they don’t even bother making promises. Angrezon ke zamanein ke leader!”

“He’s too young. Ten, fifteen years older than us. The young, dependable, mature man voters can trust. Babuji can’t hear his name without scowling.”

“Man of sense, your Babuji. There’s something wrong. Just go, bakchod, just go. Yes, sure, you too. We’re just picnicking here. There’s something wrong with the way we run our area. The party isn’t a democracy, it’ll fall apart if we have everyone setting up in their own seats like little kings. This Prasen, if we stopped supporting him he’d lose every election, he wouldn’t be elected to the board of a primary school. He’s been sitting tight on an M.P seat through the last two elections. Not a single thing he’s done or tried to do. His men go around and bully the tribals. He’ll be found dead one day and good riddance.”

“Do you want Vasu to run from West Champaran?”

“No. Bhaiyya’s running from Manth. I’d run from Kesariya but Baba wants one of us in Bihar. Nanaji will go in another year or so and someone has to step into his seat. I’ll just have to find someone for Kesariya who can be trusted to follow orders. But that’s not what you were asking.”

“I’m answered,” Shekhar says, and watches the road.

In front of the party office in Manth, Shyam says, “Did you think I wouldn’t stop?”

“I knew I couldn’t stop you,” Shekhar says. “It seemed easier to let go.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Shyam assures him, rolls the window down and beckons to a cadre. “I’ve too much planed to ruin you so early.”


End file.
